Belerma

Belerma is the bereaved beloved of Durandarte, seen by Don Quixote in his account of the enchanted Cave of Montesinos. There she appears at the head of a mourning procession, carrying the preserved heart that Montesinos says he removed from Durandarte at his friend’s request. Belerma’s significance lies in the way grief is made both visible and ritualized: she and her attendants remain bound to a loss that they repeatedly commemorate, while her appearance becomes the subject of an awkward comparison with Dulcinea of Toboso.

Identity and the legend of Durandarte

Belerma belongs to the cave’s story of enchanted figures and a fatal event at Roncesvalles. Don Quixote asks Montesinos whether the familiar account is true: that Montesinos took Durandarte’s heart from his breast and carried it to Belerma, as Durandarte had commanded while dying. Montesinos confirms the substance of the story, but corrects one detail. The instrument was not a little dagger, but a burnished poniard, sharper than an awl. That distinction briefly brings the old legend into contact with a more recent name: Sancho Panza suggests Ramon de Hoces the Sevillian as its maker. Don Quixote rejects that possibility on chronological grounds, since Ramon de Hoces lived much later than the affair at Roncesvalles. The exchange treats the story as something whose details can be tested, even while its enchanted setting places it beyond ordinary experience.

Belerma’s identity is inseparable from the heart entrusted to her. In Don Quixote’s account, it is not merely a relic of Durandarte’s death but the visible focus of her continuing mourning. Montesinos explains that she carries it in a fine cloth and that its preserved, desiccated state makes it appear mummified. Her beloved’s heart therefore survives as an object, but not as a means of restoring him: it recalls his fate and sustains the grief that defines her existence in the cave.

The procession in the cave

Don Quixote describes hearing an outcry, lamentation, sighs, and sobs before seeing the procession pass through another chamber, beyond a crystal wall. Two lines of fair damsels, dressed in mourning and wearing white turbans in the Turkish fashion, accompany Belerma. She follows them in black, with a long white veil sweeping the ground and a turban twice the size of the largest worn by the attendants. The sequence gives her a formal, almost ceremonial prominence: she is not simply one mourner among others, but the lady whose bereavement organizes the procession.

Her face is described in deliberately particular terms. Her eyebrows meet; her nose is rather flat; her mouth is large, with ruddy lips; and her sparse, ill-set teeth are nevertheless as white as peeled almonds. These details complicate the dignity of her dress and position. The woman who leads a sorrowful company is not presented as the conventionally beautiful lady her reputation might suggest. Montesinos attributes her dark circles and sickly complexion to her enchanted life, its bad nights and worse days, and the grief of holding Durandarte’s heart. He adds that she and her damsels make this procession four days each week, singing—or, more accurately, weeping—dirges over Durandarte’s body and heart. The recurrence gives mourning the structure of an obligation: the loss is not resolved but performed again and again.

Grief, appearance, and comparison

Montesinos’s explanation of Belerma’s appearance becomes a comparison with Dulcinea of Toboso. He suggests that, were it not for the suffering visible in Belerma’s face, the celebrated Dulcinea would scarcely surpass her in beauty, grace, and gaiety. Don Quixote immediately objects. He insists that the two women should not be compared, and that each is what she is. His response makes Belerma the occasion for a defense of Dulcinea’s singularity: the knight treats even an apparently incidental ranking of beauty as a threat to the absolute place his lady occupies in his imagination.

Montesinos apologizes, acknowledging that he spoke unwisely. He says that learning Don Quixote is Dulcinea’s knight would be enough to make him bite his tongue rather than compare her with anything short of heaven. The apology calms Don Quixote, whose heart, in his telling, recovers from the shock. Belerma herself does not speak or take part in this exchange; her silent presence and the heart she carries prompt a dialogue about the relative standing of two women. The contrast also sets her grief-bound condition against the idealized qualities Don Quixote attributes to Dulcinea.

Narrative role and limits of the account

Belerma reaches the reader through Don Quixote’s report of what he says he saw in the cave, with Montesinos supplying the identities and history of the figures in the procession. The scene therefore presents her as both a character in the vision and a figure whose story is interpreted aloud. Her appearance, the heart, and the repeated dirges are narrated as evidence of enchantment and sorrow; the passage does not give her an independent account of her feelings or a life outside this suspended episode.

That suspension is central to her effect. Durandarte’s death has become a preserved heart; Belerma’s love has become a recurring procession; and the cave holds both in a state where remembrance continues without changing the outcome. Don Quixote’s insistence on respecting Montesinos, despite his irritation at the comparison, further keeps the episode within the decorum of the chivalric encounter. Belerma thus embodies a romance of fidelity and mourning, while the scene’s exacting corrections and disputes over appearance expose how such a romance is being shaped through narration, interpretation, and Don Quixote’s devotion to Dulcinea of Toboso.